Domestic Violence Deacon

Last Thursday, when James Brown delivered an eloquent call to action on domestic violence before the debut of CBS's "Thursday Night Football," he was using his personal link to the issue. Through the Verizon Foundation, he has worked on domestic violence, sitting in on a crisis hotline in Austin, Tex.; talking to high school and college football coaches to help change their — and their players' — attitudes toward women; and interviewing domestic violence victims for public service announcements.

"I sat there in Austin, next to the counselors, listening to the calls," he said in a telephone interview on Monday. "It touched my heart, and it was so painful to listening to the panic in these ladies' voices that I had to take the headset off, go to a window, turn my back and shed tears."

He said that one victim he interviewed had been shot five times by her husband, a church deacon, and left for dead on the kitchen floor of their home.

Think about the layers that separate Times readers from the truth or facts of that last anecdote. The church deacon is not named. The victim is not named. The victim told James Brown about it, who told the Times reporter about it, who is now telling Times readers about it. If the husband had been an atheist or a secular humanist, do you think the Times would have mentioned it?

If a church deacon shot his wife five times and left her for dead, maybe it's the sort of crime so sensational and horrible that the Times should cover when it happens as a news story, with actual reporting on the criminal justice proceedings involved, rather than handling it with second-hand accounts passed along by football announcers.

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